The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relations, to conform to capitalist rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. —Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 19-20.
Professor David Peritz and i have been doing an independent study entitled “Reason, Modernity, Pluralism, Ecology” (it once had a longer and more creative title, but i shortened it because it will appear on my academic transcript). We’re reading a lot of foundational male social and political theorists throughout the semester (Frederich Neitzche, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, William Connelly, Pierre Bourdieu), and one ecologist feminist philosopher (Val Plumwood). I have encountered and even read some of these scholars previously, but this is my first chance to explore their work with any sense of focus or depth. While at this point we’re behind on the syllabus, David’s been accepting of my pacing, which allows me to read each text in a careful and detailed manner.
Without a doubt, these are difficult writers that i still have a lot of trouble navigating through with clarity. I do not claim understanding (or “Verstehen,” to use a Weberian term), and only beginning to get a sense of the theoretical tools they offer me. I would be inclined to use a metaphor of these readings being like eating my vegetables. Yet, the truth is, i love eating vegetables. Perhaps it’s often difficult to finish them, but when you reside two miles from an organic farm half of the year, i suppose you also learn learn to only pick what you can eat. They are tastier and more nutritious that way.
At the very least, this independent study allows me to parallel my academic interests and survey some core theorists; at the best i might be able reconcile these readings with my present academic focus, women’s history.
We met last Wednesday at the Museum for Modern Art (MoMA) to discuss Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. My best attempt at a critical summary of this text follows (and if you’re not interested in this part just skip the next six paragraphs):
Weber defines the ’spirit’ of modern capitalism as “that attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically” (27). He counters a commonly held belief (prevalent even in this contemporary society) that modern capitalism primarily originates from an individual’s spirit of greed. Instead, Weber suggests that modern capitalism is grounded in “the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life” (18). The pursuit of money and the pursuit of pleasure were thus not originally related. This mode of what Weber calls “bureaucratic rationality” was unique to the West, due to both the “the separation of business from the household” (i.e. the delineation of the public and private spheres) and “rational book-keeping” (xxxv). This ethic of modern capitalism was morally underwritten through the Puritan idea of a “calling,” or “a life task, a definite field in which to work” (39) first articulated by Martin Luther and later articulated by Protestant Calvinist asceticism: a worldly religion, focused “towards the rational mastery” of the earthly realm (xiv).
Calvinism was distinct from other forms of Protestantism for a number of reasons: because its texts asserted predestination and denied free will, it created an “unprecedented inner loneliness” of individuals who did not know — and could not know — if they would reach salvation (60). Weber argues that Calvinism held a negative attitude toward the “sensuous and emotional elements in culture and religion, because they are no use toward salvation” (62). For this reason, the Calvinist’s “intercourse with his God was carried on in deep spiritual isolation” (63). Any work that a Calvinist participates in thus “exists to serve the glorification of God and for that purposes alone” (64). Any labor performed by an individual is done in the service of “in the service of impersonal social usefulness” (ibid.).
Each of these ideas helped solidify the ethic that was required for beraucratic rationality, which is inherently related to modern capitalism. Weber does not deny the existence of greedy adventure capitalists, nor does he suggest that such a Protestant ethic is the sole determinate cause of modern capitalism’s existence. He merely claims that bureaucratic rationalization of modern capitalism would not have gotten off the ground without an ethic to support it, and that ethic lies in Calvinist asceticism. In summary, the protestant ethic (PE) authorizes the accumulation of wealth in a frugal, bureaucratized manner under the aegis of the ‘calling’ (120). Along with its anti-body aesthetic the PE also suggested that class inequality and division of labor were divinely ordained. This very ethic (and not mere ‘adventure capitalism’) is precisely what allows more wealth to be accumulated. And so the cycle began…
Weber then argues that this ethic, once established, produces its own motivations, detached from its religious origins. Weber frequently cites Benjamin Franklin’s writing as evidence of the Protestant Ethic stripped from its religious language (123). Franklin’s association of profit with virtue helps explain Weber’s provocative metaphor of modern capitalism as an “iron cage”:
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality… In Baxter’s view (a religious writer) the care of eternal goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage” (123, emphasis added).
Weber continues,
For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (124).
I began this post with Weber’s note that modern capitalism is an “immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live.” It has penetrated every dimension of social life, thus presenting itself as “natural.” The goal for me is quite straightforward: break out of the cage.
Welcome to the machine, sings Pink Floyd, in a song from their album “Wish You Were Here.” I find cages and prisons and their various manifestations in contemporary society fascinating, to say the least. A study of the operation of these prison/cages is of course an essential prerequisite to breaking free from them. I read Michel Foucault’s essay “Panopticonism” for Lyde Sizer’s Visions & Revisions class, so I thought about Weber in relationship to Foucault, especially viz. a viz the contemporary a surveillance culture.
After our hour of discussion about the text ended, David left and i explored the exhibits at MomA. This was only my second time in the museum; the first was during a free Friday in early autumn 2007. It wasn’t too crowded, so i had a lot of time to wonder around the floors of artwork. I found two pieces particularly striking. The first was the “Sweet Dreams Security Series’ by Matthias Megyeri, a series of artifacts that perversely connected the idea of security culture to love.
On the bottom floor I was astounded by the work of performance artist of Tehching Hsieh, most especially his “Cage Piece,” in which he voluntarily lived in a cage constructed in his apartment for a year. A recent New York Times article offers a biographical sketch of Hsieh and his other projects, some of which were also featured at the MoMA exhibit. I found the following passage especially edifying:
“With the downtown art scene vibrating around him, he eked out a living at Chinese restaurants and construction jobs, feeling alien, alienated and creatively barren until it came to him: He could turn his isolation into art.
I most definitely identify with the “isolation—art” equation. After all these cages, I was reminded of some pictures Natty took of me so long ago:
Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections on Bridging the Gap
Andrew Feenberg
Posing the Problem
-Theories of modernity and technology studies have both made great strides in recent years, but remain quite disconnected despite the obvious overlap in their concerns. How can one expect to understand modernity without an adequate account of the technological developments that make it possible, and how can one study specific technologies without a theory of the larger society in which they develop? These questions have not even been posed, much less answered persuasively, by most leading contributors to the fields. The basic issue I would like to address is the why and wherefore of this peculiar mutual ignorance. In the second part of this chapter I will propose one possible resolution of the dilemma.
-Before I enter into my theme, I should add that I do not intend here to survey all the activity in these two very active fields. In particular, I am leaving out of my account the many scholars who work on concrete problems with a range of tools drawn from both. My justification for this oversight is twofold: first, I have not yet found among these crossovers a satisfactory theoretical mediation between the two fields; and second, the most influential figures writing theory in these fields are not seeking such a mediation but on the contrary ignore or exclude each others' contributions. Clearly, this situation deserves treatment on its own terms. Here then is a brief summary of the conflicting views prevalent in these overlapping fields.
-Modernity theory claims that the rationalization of society involves the imposition of a specific form on social processes. That form is often presented negatively, as the reduction of complexity, meaning, and normative and qualitative richness of the traditional social world. This reduction exposes reality to technical manipulation, understood as an impoverished mode of activity oriented exclusively toward efficiency which has nevertheless the advantage of giving power over nature, enabling large scale organization, and supporting the temporally and spatially extensive interactions that characterize modern societies. When this view is concretized in the discussion of technology the result is often a normative style of cultural critique that is anathema to contemporary technology studies. Albert Borgmann’s critique of the "device paradigm" is a well known example of this approach (Borgmann, 1984). Other technology critics from Aldous Huxley to the present emphasize the incorporation of human beings into the technical system as mere objects.
-Technology studies replies by pointing out the social complexity of technology, the multiple actors involved with its creation and the consequent richness of the values embedded in design, as opposed to the abstractions of the critique. Modernity theory goes wrong when it claims that all of society stands under values somehow specific to a science and technology differentiated from other spheres. Technology and values are not substantial "things" belonging to separate spheres and related externally. That is the view we hear not only in the cultural critiques of modernity theorists but more ominously in the typical conservative arguments according to which technological imperatives forbid this or that important reform, for example, environmental reform.
-But technology studies loses part of the truth when it emphasizes only the social complexity and embeddedness of technology and ignores the powerful shaping force of differentiated technical professions and the various forms of management and manipulation of human beings these support. The differentiation, limited though it may be, nevertheless makes it possible to grasp any concrete value or thing as a manipulable variable, and this includes human beings themselves. Where traditional craft work expressed vocational investment of the whole personality, modern work organization abstracts the deskilled occupations from personal character and growth the better to expose the worker to external controls. Similarly, traditional architecture condensed historical and aesthetic expression with stability and durability, whereas today strictly "utilitarian" construction is the rule. True, other social values rush in behind the scenes to fill the vacuum left by these technical abstractions–e.g. profit–but the abstraction process is a real characteristic of modernity with immense social consequences.
-Is it possible to find some truth in both these positions or are they mutually exclusive as they certainly appear to be at first sight? I believe a synthesis is possible, but only if the concept of technical rationality is revised to free it from implicit positivistic assumptions. Science studies could help us to treat the abstract workings of rationality as a social phenomenon without hypostatizing it as a substantial reality. But we must also find a way to preserve the insight of modernity theory into the distinctiveness of modernity and its problems. We need to identify an intermediary zone within which rationality operates according its own logic and laws even as it is interlocked with other spheres through internal relations that determine precisely how it is deployed in concrete realizations of one sort or another. Rationality as a cultural principle is truly different from other ways of organizing social life, but no ultimate logic overcomes the contingency of actual instances of rationality in the world which remain bound to the larger social process. This technology, that market, will always be socially specific and inexplicable on the terms of a philosophically purified concept of reason.
Science of Society and History of Science
-The writings of Marx are surely the single most influential source of theories of modernity down to the present day. His thought is usually identified with a universalistic faith in progress. At its core there is an intuition he shared with his century, the notion that a great divide forever separates premodern from modern forms of social organization. All later contrasts of Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft, organic vs. mechanical solidarity, traditional vs. post-traditional society, and so on, owe something to Marx’s canonical formulation of this idea in texts such as the Communist Manifesto. After World War II, modernization theory emerged as the chief sociological competitor to Marxism, but it fought on this same terrain of progressive universalism laid out by Marx.
-As has often been noted, Marx’s political vision flows from his confidence in the growing rationalization of society. In his view, rationalization not only involves technical progress but also the ever more lucid self-understanding of the lower classes. In fact these two themes are closely related. As society as reorganized around the market, a new proletarian world emerges in the factory. There domination and subordination take the impersonal form of technical management and deskilled labor under the control of machines. The subjects of this modern form of power will find it far easier than earlier lower classes to demystify the ruling ideology and free themselves inwardly for revolution.
-Thus the sense of radical discontinuity present in these texts involves more than a theory of society; it also implies a certain way of being an individual in the society it explains. As the tectonic plates of culture are thrown into movement by the market, the individual is freed from naïve faith to an ironic sense of the gaps between ideals and realities. Critical social theory is founded not just on cognitive hypotheses but on the existential irony of the modern individual. Its method is therefore fundamentally reflexive and demystifactory as well as analytic, and links these two core ideas: on the one hand, technical progress based on rational methods raises productivity and supports the transition to the new society; on the other hand, a scientific understanding of social reality supports a new form of individuality freed from ideology and religion.
-If there is any one figure who has played a comparable role for contemporary technology studies, it is Thomas Kuhn. It is true that the case for Kuhn as a founding father is less clear. Many students of science and technology, particularly historians, avoided the positivistic errors Kuhn criticized long before the appearance of his famous book on The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Kuhn, 1970). However, Kuhn's overwhelming success lent a kind of philosophical legitimacy to these trends and encouraged others to follow their lead. Non-positivist historiographic methods triumphed in science studies and subsequently influenced the new wave of technology studies that grew out of science studies in the 1980s. Unlike Marx, Kuhn is perhaps less an origin than a symbol of a radically new approach.
-Of course neither Marx nor Kuhn are followed slavishly by contemporary scholars, but we should not be surprised to find that many background assumptions derived from their thought or the thought of contemporaries with similar ideas are still at work in the most up to date contributions to modernity theory and technology studies. I would like to begin by considering several such assumptions that may help to explain the gap between these two fields.
-Kuhn writes somewhere in the long shadow cast by Marx, like all modern historians and social theorists, as can be deduced from the place of "revolution" in the title of his major book, but his take on historical discontinuities is quite different from Marx’s. The demystificatory impulse is still present, but now it is directed at the significance granted in modern times to the "great divide" that characterizes modernity itself. Kuhn did not reject the idea of radical discontinuities in history which, on the contrary, continues to shape his vision of the past. But where Marx took for granted the existence of a sort of rationality gradient underlying the concept of modernity, Kuhn deconstructed the idea of a universal standard of rationality capable of transcending particular cultures and ordering them in a developmental sequence. Now the ironic glance turns back on itself, undermining the cognitive self-assurance implied in the stance of the naive ironist.
-Kuhn’s method had momentous consequences for much later technology studies and especially for the wider reception of science studies in the academic world. He showed that the evolutionary notion of scientific development is an illusion, that in fact there is no one continuous scientific tradition but a succession of different traditions each with its own basic assumptions and standards of truth, its own "paradigms." The illusion of continuity arises from glossing over the complexities and ambiguities of scientific change and reconstructing it as a progress leading straight to us. If we go back to the decisive moments of scientific revolution and examine what actually occurred from the standpoint of the participants, their competing positions, their arguments and experimental results, we will discover that the case is by no means so clear.
-This practice-oriented approach is neatly captured in Latour’s suggestion that science resembles a Janus looking back on its past in an entirely different spirit from that in which it looks forward to the future (Latour, 1987: 12). Science, Latour suggests, is a sum of results which "hold" under certain conditions, such as repeated experimental tests. But the backward glance shows us nature confirming the results of science, while the forward glance presents a very different picture in which the results which hold are called "nature." Looking backward one can say that the conditions of truth were met because the hypotheses of science were true. Looking forward one must say rather that meeting the conditions defines what scientists will use for truth. The backward glance tells of a necessary evolutionary progress of knowledge about the way things are independent of science; the forward glance tells of the sheer contingency of the process in which science decides on the way things are. The theorist who studies this Janus-faced monster is no longer a scientist but has become the narrator of a story.
-I doubt if Kuhn would appreciate this Nietzschean twist on his original contribution, from which unfortunately he retreated in subsequent writings. But the point is really not so much to offer an interpretation of Kuhn as of his significance on the maps of theory. From that standpoint, it is clear that Kuhn is in some sense the nemesis of Marx, and the harbinger of what has come to be called "postmodernism." And to the extent that much technology studies reflects Kuhn’s methodological innovations, it too bears a certain elective affinity for postmodernism, or at least for a "non-modern" critique of Marx’s heritage. Yet what is preserved across these theoretical divides is also important: the idea of the theorist as demystifying appearances and restoring the rightful names of things in a this-worldly accounting of what is real and what is merely ideological self-delusion. That is an inherently progressive idea which implicitly affirms freedom and individuality whatever the euphemistic terminology and political skepticism that accompanies it in post- or non-modern formulations. These theoretical adversaries thus share something on which to build a shaky bridge between traditions.
-Kuhn’s interests were sufficiently different from Marx’s that at first the contrast between their positions went unnoticed. Nowhere does Kuhn discuss economic systems, class relations, state forms, and Marx’s rather sparse remarks on science add up to a theory only in the overheated constructions of the old Soviet diamat and Althusser. Kuhn certainly had no intention of commenting on issues beyond his field, the history of science, but a critique of Marx is implied in his notion of scientific revolution insofar as the latter did believe that his own work was scientific and, more deeply, that scientific rationality characterizes the modern. Thus just because Kuhn undermined the pretensions of science to access transhistorical truths, his work also undercuts Marx’s theory.
-The implicit conflict came to the surface in various formulations of postmodernism but it seemed still a mere disagreement between abstract epistemological positions. Things have changed now that it has emerged inside the ill matched couple we are considering here, modernity theory and technology studies. Since no fully coherent account of modernity is possible without an approach to technology, and vice versa, the tension itself must finally be theorized. It is no longer just a matter of one’s position on the great question of realism vs. relativism but concerns basic analytic categories and research methods.
-Consider the implications of technology studies for the notion of progress in modernity theory. If Kuhnian relativism has the power to dissolve the self-certainty of science and technology, then what becomes of the notion of a rationalized society? In most theories of modernity, rationality appears as a spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once customary and ideological obstructions are removed. On the contrary, the contingent scientific rationality of science studies can only gain a grip on society at large through the concrete practices in which it is, as Latour would say, actively "exported" out of the laboratory and into the farms, streets and factories (Latour, 1987: 249ff).
-The theorists export their relativistic method as they trace the movements of its object. They dissolve all the stable patterns of progress into contingent outcomes of processes of "scaling up" or controversy. Institutional or cultural phenomena no longer have stable identities but must be grasped through the process of their construction in the arguments and debates of the day. This approach ends up eliminating the very categories of modernity theory, such as universal and particular, reason and tradition, culture and class, which are transformed from explanations into explananda. One can neither rise above the level of case histories or talk meaningfully about the essence and future of modernity under these limitations.
-Modernity theory suffers disaster on its own ground once it encounters the new approach. If no determined path of technical evolution guides social development toward higher stages, if technical evolution could take different paths reflected in different types of modern society, then the old certainties of the theory collapse. One can no longer be sure if such essential dimensions of modernity as progress, rationalization, and democratization are actually universal tendencies of modern societies or just local consequences of the peculiar path of Western development. Unless it squarely faces the difficulties, the theory of modernity must become so abstract this kind of objection no longer troubles it, with a consequent loss of usefulness, or cease to be a theory at all and transform itself into a descriptive and analytical study of specific cases.
-Here are two examples which show the depth of the problems.
System or Practice
Modernity as Differentiation
-Modernity theory on the whole either continues to ignore technology or acknowledges it in an outmoded deterministic framework. Most revealing is the extreme but instructive case of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas is one of the most important social theorists today. His influence is widespread and the rigor of his thought admirable. Yet he has elaborated the most architectonically sophisticated theory of modernity without any reference at all to technology. This blissful indifference to what should surely be a focal concern of any adequate theory of modernity requires explanation, especially since Habermas is strongly influenced by Marx for whom technology is of central importance.
-The basis of Habermas’s approach is his theory of rationality, derived from Weber. According to this theory, modernity consists essentially in the differentiation of the various "cultural spheres." Religion, the state, law, the market, science, technology each become distinct social domains with their own logic and institutional identity. Under these conditions, science and technology take on their familiar post-traditional form as independent disciplines. Rationality in its scientific-technical form is purified of religious and customary elements. Similarly, markets and administrations are liberated from the admixture of religious and feudal prejudices and family ties that bound them in the past. They emerge as "systems" governed by an internal logic of equivalent exchange. What I will call the differentiation theory of modernity holds that the spread of such rationalities is the foundation of a complex modern society. However contestable this account of the phenomenon of modernity, something significant is captured in it. Modern societies really are different, and the difference seems closely related to the quasi-automatic functioning of institutions such as markets and administrations, which organize vast impersonal systems.
-At first Habermas argued that rationalization threatened technocratic intrusions into the lifeworld of communicative interaction, and this reference to techno-cracy seemed to link his theory to the technical development of modern societies (Habermas, 1970). However, his mature formulation of the theory ignores technology and focuses exclusively on the spread of markets and administration. Habermas identifies these as rational "systems" which organize most action coordination under modern conditions (Habermas, 1984, 1987).
-The effect of Habermas’s reformulation of Weber’s differentiation theory is to neutralize rational systems by identifying them with rationality as such. In many of Habermas's formulations, for example when he considers workers' control, it seems that radical demands would be irrationalist if they presupposed the social construction of these systems. He thus offers no suggestions, at least in The Theory of Communicative Action, for reforming markets and administrations and instead suggests limiting the range of their social influence. In the case of science and technology this puzzling retreat from a social account of rational systems is carried to the point of caricature. Habermas claims that science and technology are based quite simply on a nonsocial "objectivating attitude" toward the natural world. This would seem to leave no room at all for the social dimension of science and technology, which has been shown over and over to shape the formulation of concepts and designs. Clearly, if scientists and technologists stand in a purely objective relation to nature, there can be no philosophical interest in studying the social sources of their insights. On Habermas’s view, it is difficult to see how a properly differentiated rationality could incorporate social values and attitudes except as sources of error or extrinsic goals governing "use." This implies too a strange methodological dualism in which phenomenological accounts of the lifeworld coexist with an objectivistic systems-theoretic explanation of "systems" such as markets and administrations.
-The effect of this approach is to liberate social theory from all the details of sociological and historical study of actual instances of rationality. No matter what story sociologists and historians have to tell about a particular market, administration, or, afortiori, technology, this is inessential with respect to the philosophically abstracted forms of differentiated rationality. The real issue is not whether this or that contingent happening might have led to different practical results, for all that matters to social theory is the range of rational systems, the extent of their intrusions on the proper terrain of communicative action (Feenberg, 1999a: chap. 7).
-Could it be that the most important differentiation for Habermas is the one that separates social theory from certain sociological and historical disciplines, the material of which he feels he must ignore to pursue his own path as a philosopher? But when the results are compared to earlier theories of modernity, it becomes clear what a tremendous price Habermas pays to win a space for philosophy. Marx had a concrete critique of the revolutionary institutions of his epoch, the market and the factory system, and later modernization theory foresaw a host of social and political consequences of economic development. But Habermas’s complaints about the boundaries of welfare state administration seem quite remote from the main sources of social development today, the revolutions in global markets, in technically mediated communications and other technologies that are transforming the planet. In his work the theory of modernity is no longer concerned with these material issues but operates at a higher level, a level where, unfortunately, very little is going on.
-Of course other social theorists have made contributions to the theory of modernity that do touch on technology interestingly, sometimes under the influence of other aspects of Habermas's theory. Ulrich Beck has proposed a theory of "reflexive modernity" in which the role of technology is explicitly recognized and discussed in terms of transformations in the nature of rationality. Beck starts out from the same concept of differentiation as Habermas, but he considers it to be only a stage in the development of modern societies, a stage he calls "simple modernity." Simple modernity creates a technology that is both extremely powerful and totally fragmented. The early Marxist Lukács already identified this plausible outcome of differentiation as a consequence of "reification." According to Lukács, capitalist society is characterized by the rationality of the "parts"–individual enterprises for example–and the irrationality of the whole, leading to recurrent crises. The uncontrolled interactions between the reified fragments have catastrophic consequences in Beck too. He argues that today a "risk society" is emerging, especially noticeable in the environmental domain. "Risk society…arises in the continuity of autonomized modernization processes which are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats. Cumulatively and latently, the latter produce threats which call into question and eventually destroy the foundations of industrial society" (Beck, 1994:5-6).
-The risk society is inherently reflexive in the sense that its consequences contradict its premises. As it becomes conscious of the threat it poses for its own survival, reflexivity becomes self-reflection and the way is open to new kinds of political interventions aimed at transforming industrialism. Beck places his hope for an alternative modernity in a radical mixing of the differentiated spheres that overcomes their isolation and hence their tendency to blunder into unforeseen crises. "The rigid theory of simple modernity, which conceives of system codes as exclusive and assigns each code to one and only one subsystem, blocks out the horizon of future possibilities….This reservoir is discovered and opened up only when code combinations, code alloys and code syntheses are imagined, understood, invented and tried out" (Beck, 1994: 32).
-This revision of modernity theory is daring and suggestive, but it still rests on a notion of differentiation which would surely be contested by most contemporary students of science and technology. The major thrust of much of the work since Kuhn has been to show that "differentiation,"–Latour calls something similar "purification"–is an illusion, that the various forms of modern rationality belong to the continuum of daily practice rather that isolating themselves in a separate sphere (Latour, 1991: 81).
-Yet the main phenomena identified by the theory of modernity do certainly exist and require explanation. A puzzling impasse is reached in the interdisciplinary relationship around this problem. Practice-oriented accounts of particular cases cannot be generalized to explain the systemic character of modernity, while differentiation theory appears to be invalidated by what we have learned about the social character of rationality from science and technology studies. A large part of the reason for this impasse, I believe, is the continuing power of disciplinary boundaries which, even where they do not become a theoretical foundation as in Habermas, still divide theorists and researchers. Far from weakening, these boundaries have become still more rigid in the wake of the sharp empiricistic turn in science and technology studies, and the growing scepticism in these fields with regard to the theory of modernity in all its forms.
---The Logic of the Local
-Andrew Pickering’s interesting book The Mangle of Practice offers an illustration of the limitations of science studies as it attempts to understand central problems of modernity. Pickering firmly adopts the point of view of the forward looking Janus. His "mangle of practice" is the process in which subjects and objects of action are "emergently transformed and delineated in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation" (Pickering, 1995: 23). Nothing escapes the mangle. No stable prior conditions determine how it operates since everything present in the environment of practice is "mangled" in the course of each exercise. Patterns emerge, which Pickering claims have explanatory power, but these are extremely generalized structures of practical action rather than the more concrete categories of social theory.
=The limitations of Pickering’s approach appear clearly in his attempted refutation of David Noble's (1984) classic study of the automation of the machine tool industry. Noble had shown how class interests shaped the innovation process. In his account, the complicated twists and turns of the story were due to unexpected limitations of the technology and worker resistance, but throughout management was guided by a constant goal: the maintenance of class power. Pickering challenges this interpretation of events on the grounds that it assumes the existence of prior constraints on practice--the mangle--when in fact these constraints can only be identified after the fact. As he puts it, "To be precise, appeal to them [constraints] is vacuous unless their contours can be specified in advance of whatever episode is to be explained. And this is, at minimum, an exceedingly difficult requirement to meet" (Pickering, 1995: 175).
=Difficult indeed! This astonishing argument would gratify David Hume but it makes mincemeat of social knowledge. No sensible social theorist has ever hoped to fulfil Pickering’s "minimum" condition for "constraint talk" for the simple reason that society is far too complex for its future configuration to be predictable in any detail. But nevertheless reference to constraints is inescapable in the real world where wealth, power, laws, markets, control of resources and the sanction of technical experts usually weigh far more heavily on choices over far longer periods than other factors such as democratic public debate, moral values, and the interests of the weak and disenfranchised. Pickering's radical scepticism with regard to constraints leaves no room for social knowledge beyond the combination of narrative accounts and the highly abstract description of the "mangle" he offers.
=A similar problem with the "export" of science studies methods to society occurs around the supposed opposition of local and global analyses. A purely local analysis extended to ever wider reaches is said by many in science studies to suffice in the study of society without the need for falsely global categories. This is to be sure a puzzling dichotomy. If the local analysis is sufficiently extended, does it not become nonlocal, indeed general? Why not just generalize from local examples to macro categories and theories? We have already seen one reason in the discussion of Pickering's Humean skepticism regarding constraints. Bruno Latour has equivalent arguments of greater power and generality.
=For Latour, the analysis of contingent contests for power within specific networks suffices, and the introduction of macro-social terms or references to nature would simply mask the activities of the underlying actants which establish these categories in the first place. "If I do not speak of ‘culture,’ that is because this word is reserved for only one of the units carved out by Westerners to define man. But forces can only be shared between the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ locally and to reinforce certain networks" (Latour, 1984: 222-223, my translation). Latour continues in this passage to similarly reduce the terms "society" and "nature" to local actions. Note the consequence of this "symmetry of humans and nonhumans:" there is no longer a fundamental difference between the human elements of the network qua "social" and its non-human elements, the "natural." Presumably, in the undifferentiated network no specifically natural or social status can be assigned such different things as a die-off of fish in the Mississippi and a student protest in Paris, a scientist’s representation of nuclear forces and a politician’s representation of American farmers. Instead, attributions of social and natural status are contingent outcomes of processes engaged at a more fundamental level, the level of the network of actants.
=This stance appears to have conservative political implications since in any conflictual situation the stronger party establishes the definition of the basic terms, culture, nature, and society, and no appeal to a prior essence is available to the defeated to validate their claims quand-même. Law's well known network analysis of Portuguese navigation is thus widely criticized for ignoring the fate of the conquered peoples incorporated into the colonial network. Hans Radder argues that Actor Network Theory contains an implicit bias toward the victors (Law, 1989; Radder, 1996: 111-112).
=I have argued elsewhere that without a global social theory, it is difficult to establish what I call the "symmetry of program and anti-program," i.e., the equal analytic value of the principal actors’ intentions, more or less successfully realized in the structure of the network, and those of the weaker parties they dominate (Feenberg, 1999a: chap. 5). In particular, the symmetry of humans and nonhumans blocks access to the central insight of modernity theory, the extension of technical control from nature to humans themselves. I concluded that although the empiricist preference for the local sounds innocent enough, in excluding all reference to the traditional categories of social theory, such as class, culture, the state, nature, truly rigorous localism blocks even-handed study of social conflict.
=Latour has apparently been troubled by such criticisms and in a recent book attempts to address them (Latour 1999). He is anxious to show that his radical replacement for social theory can do the work done by the traditional categories. Indeed, he concedes that unless he can do this work as well or better than the old social theory, his argument will fall on deaf ears (Latour, 1999: 148). How does he go about it? Here is a necessarily abbreviated account of his provocative central argument.
=Latour agrees that it must be possible and reasonable to resist the definition of reality imposed by the victors in the struggle for control of the network. The traditional ground for this is the appeal from the social consensus to a transcendent truth of nature. Latour objects to this appeal on the ground that it is used by scientific elites to block democratic discourse. In fact that is only half the story. The egalitarian sweep of modern history also rests on such appeals, by the lower classes, by women, slaves, the colonized, each of whom have argued successfully that natural differences do not sanction their subordination.
=Although this fact of democratic history does not enter Latour’s argument with the prominence of his critique of scientific authority, he is well aware of it. But, he argues, considered from a purely operational viewpoint, the democratic appeal to nature has nothing to do with nature as such and everything to do with the procedures of debate and struggle. What we really need is not a clear distinction between "nature" and "society," "fact" and "value," "truth" and "power," but a clear understanding of the legitimate organization of public debate. True democracy must protect public access for entities and persons hitherto excluded from consideration, while also insuring that new elements and voices be integrated harmoniously with the established structure of the network. In sum, allowance must be made for the intervention of the new and unpredictable while preserving the network from incoherence and collapse (Latour, 1999: 172-173). The significant division of function contrasts not ontological realities (e.g. nature and society) but the procedures Latour calls "the accounting power," and "the ordering power" ("le pouvoir de prise en compte" and "le pouvoir d’ordonnancement" (Latour, 1999: 156).
=This explanation is meant to show us that we can live without an ontologically hypostasized concept of nature and society. As noted earlier, what we refer to as "nature" and "society" are results of processes of interaction that are themselves prior to the reflective division of spheres. But what then is the network or "collective" as Latour sometimes calls it? Latour waffles continuously between an ontological and a non-ontological answer to this question. Sometimes he describes it as merely a set of operational procedures and their results, but then it could still be resolved at the end of the day into an ontologically defined "nature" and "society." To avoid this conceptual backsliding, Latour argues that the network posits nature and society and that they gain their reality from that positing. But this move clearly grants ontological precedence to the network.
=Paradoxes arise from this ontological definition of the network. The process in which the lines between society and nature are drawn involves activity on both sides of the line prior to the drawing of the line. Indeed, since human subjects and natural objects can only be distinguished once the line between them is drawn, we cannot refer to processes in which the line is drawn as the result of human action nor as an accommodation of thought to things. Latour calls the participants in the network "actants," but how, after all, can the actors act before their existence has been defined by their action? How, one wonders, can we even talk about actants without using common sense language in which the human and the natural are distinguished apriori?
=It would seem that we could say nothing about such a network, but these paradoxes do not bother Latour. Rather, he has a lot to say, and what he says is contained in local analyses. The rhetorical strategy of Latour’s transcendental localism consists in distributing the terms usually attributed to human subjectivity across the boundaries between the human and the non-human actors whose coming into existence is itself the object of the story. The most famous case in point is Michel Callon’s discussion of scientific research on scallops in which the little devils are described as more or less "cooperative" with the researchers (Callon, 1986).
=Such analyses are supposed to trace the co-emergence of society and nature in the processes of social, scientific and technological development. Since these processes are historical, what we call "nature" now develops and changes much as does "society." Latour refers to Whitehead’s process philosophy for a metaphysical sanction for his peculiar view in which the difference between nature and society is effaced to make room for a third term out of which both emerge (Latour, 1994).
=Latour promises that the tortured arguments necessary to support this radical departure from common sense will soon seem obvious as common sense itself is revised to conform with his views (Latour, 1999: 32-33). But this is quite unlikely as it depends on the spread of a radical ontological operationalism that eliminates or redefines all the categories of traditional philosophy and social science. This is quite exciting–a conceptual revolution!–but the very cause for excitement seems likely to limit the wider impact of Latour’s theory.
=Now it is true that there is no intrinsic reason why science studies should seek to explode the entire framework of social theory, and not all current approaches lead to such radical consequences. Yet the tendency to do so is clearly quite influential in science studies circles. I call attention to it because it takes to the limit a consequence of certain original methodological choices applied to technology and through technology to modern social life. The results, I have argued, are intriguing but ultimately unsatisfactory.
=Splitting the Difference
=Interpretation and Worldhood
=In this second part of this paper I want to suggest one of several possible lines of argument leading to a partial resolution of the conflict between modernity theory and technology studies. The key point on which I will focus is the role of interpretation in the two strands of theory we have been discussing. Interpretative understanding of society is an alternative to deterministic accounts. Where society is not studied as a law governed realm of causal interactions, it is usually considered to be a realm of meaning engaging interacting subjects of some kind, for example, subjects of consciousness or of language. In this context, hermeneutics appears as an explanatory model more suitable to society than the nomological model derived from physical science.
=The place of interpretation in technology studies should be obvious from the Kuhnian critique of the myth of the given. Data do not speak unambiguously but must be interpreted, and interpretation calls into play the very theories the data are supposed to verify. This hermeneutic circularity is translated into social ontological terms when a similar approach is applied to technology.
=Pinch and Bijker’s famous analysis of the bicycle highlights the role of "interpretative flexibility" in the evolution of design (Pinch and Bijker, 1989). At the origin the bicycle had two different meanings for two different social groups. That difference in interpretation of a largely overlapping assemblage of basic parts yielded designs with distinctive social significance and consequence. Pinch and Bijker conclude that "different interpretations by social groups of the content of artifacts lead by means of different chains of problems and solutions to different further developments" (Pinch and Bijker, 1989: 42). But this means that there is no stable, pregiven telos of technological development because goals are variables, not constants, and technical devices themselves have no self-evident purpose. Clearly, we are a long way here from the old deterministic conception of technology in which changes in design follow from the technical logic of innovation. Meaning is now central.
=Interpretation plays an equally important role for modernity theorists such as Habermas and Heidegger. Both thinkers rely on a contrast between scientific-technical rationality and another type of thinking that articulates human experience. Their phenomenological approach privileges everyday understandings as an original realm within which human identity and reality are encountered more profoundly than in science and technology. Interpretation rather than law prevails in the study of this realm.
=Of course there are major differences between Habermas and Heidegger. Habermas’s "lifeworld" of communicative interaction coexists alongside science and technology as a more fundamental but independent sphere. The lifeworld is the domain of social integration and reproduction by contrast with the rationalized systems so important in modern societies. This approach confines hermeneutics to communicative interactions and social institutions, seemingly exempting science and technology (Habermas, 1984, 1987).
=For Heidegger worlds are realms of meaning and corresponding practices rather than collections of objects as in conventional usage. The Heideggerian term more nearly resembles our metaphoric concept of a "world of the theatre," or a "Chinese world" than the literal meaning. A world is "disclosed" according to Heidegger in the sense that the orientation of the subject opens up a coherent perspective on reality. Here interpretation is no specialized intellectual activity but the very basis of our existence as human beings (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 17).
=In his later work Heidegger developed a radical critique of technology for its power to "de-world," that is, to strip its objects of their inherent potentialities and reduce them to mere raw materials. This turn in Heidegger’s analysis of technology seems to cancel its hermeneutic import since the message of technology is always the same, what Heidegger calls "enframing" (Heidegger, 1977). Although his theory of technology is unremittingly negative, some of his followers have attempted to modify it interestingly. I will discuss one of these innovative applications of Heideggerian ideas to the problem of technology and attempt to carry it further, well beyond the bounds of Heidegger's own thought.
=The early Heidegger’s concept of the lifeworld has been applied interestingly by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus in a recent book entitled Disclosing New Worlds (1997). As we will see, the major focus of this book is on social interaction rather than technology, but this turns out to be a correctable error of emphasis. The authors’ starting point in any case is the notion of disclosure which lies at the center of Heidegger’s thought.
=Disclosing New Worlds takes up Heidegger’s basic concepts in the context of a theory of what it calls history-making practices. The problem to which the book is addressed is how disclosive activities actually change the world we live in, opening us to new or different perspectives and reorganizing our practices around a different sense of what is real and important. The book reviews three main types of history-making disclosive practices corresponding to three main types of historical actors.
="Articulations" refocus a community on its core values and practices. This is primarily the task of political leaders. As an example, the authors cite John Kennedy’s ability to generate enthusiasm for the space race around themes such as the new frontier. "Cross-appropriations" weave together values and practices from diverse domains of social life in new patterns that alter the structure of our world. This is the work of successful social movements, such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) which transposed ideas about responsible behavior from the domain of work into the domain of leisure. Finally, and most significantly, Disclosing New Worlds describes "reconfiguration" as the process in which a marginal practice is transformed into a dominant practice. Entrepreneurs are the agents of reconfiguration, which they accomplish through introducing new products that suggest a new style of life. The focus of Disclosing New Worlds is not on the products but on the entrepreneurs. Yet it is clear from the examples in the book that, as the authors write explicitly, "it is the product or service, not the virtuous life-style of the entrepreneur, that makes the world change..." (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 45).
=Although technology studies are not mentioned, the examples illustrate nicely the theme of interpretative flexibility. Gillette’s successful introduction of the disposable razor is a texbook case. The traditional straight razor belonged to a world in which men cared for and cherished finely made objects. Gillette sensed the possibility of a redefinition of the masculine relation to objects in terms of control and disposability and furthered that change with a new type of razor. In other words, Gillette did not just serve a pre-existing need for sharper razors. "The entrepreneurial question was, What did his annoyance at the dullness mean? Did it mean that he just wanted a better-crafted straight-edge razor that kept its edge longer? Or did he want a new way of dealing with things? We shall argue that genuine entrepreneurs are sensitive to the historical questions, not the pragmatic ones, and that what is interesting about their innovations is that they change the style of our practices as a whole in some domain" (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 42-43). Style is a very general feature of worlds relevant to the design of artifacts. In this case the change in style involves the transition from a respectful to a controlling attitude toward objects.
=We find more precise tools for discussing the reconfigurative work of artifacts in the notions of "actors" and "scripts" in technology studies. In particular the multiplicity of actors identified in many case histories offers a useful corrective to the book’s implicit individualism. The bias toward the heroic disclosive power of poets, philosophers and statesmen, presumed to be in touch with "Being," has been noted in Heidegger and his followers before. Perhaps the over-emphasis on entrepreurs is a modest expression of that bias. In any case, the failure adequately to deal with the role of technology confirms the tendency of modernity theories to abstract from the world of things. But this time there is a difference: for once a modernity theory lends itself to a shift in emphasis to take technology into account because in fact technology is there already at the core of the theory. "A world, for Heidegger," the authors write, "...is a totality of interrelated pieces of equipment, each used to carry out a specific task such as hammering in a nail. These tasks are undertaken so as to achieve certain purposes, such as building a house. Finally, this activity enables those performing it to have identities, such as being a carpenter" (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 17).
Instrumentalization Theory
=We now have two complementary premises drawn from the two theoretical traditions we are attempting to reconcile. On the one hand, the evolution of technologies depends on the interpretive practices of their users. On the other hand, human beings are essentially interpreters shaped by world-disclosing technologies. Human beings and their technologies are involved in a co-construction without origin. Modernity theory provokes us to ask how this process operates when it is mediated by differentiated technical disciplines and aims at the "human control of human beings." Technology studies keeps us focussed on the essentially social nature of the technical rationality deployed in those disciplines. The hermeneutic perspective builds a bridge between these different perspectives.
=A synthesis must enable us to understand the central role of technology in modern life as both technically rational in form and rich in socially specific content. I have proposed what I call "instrumentalization theory" to effect such a synthesis (Feenberg, 1999a, chap. 9). Instrumentalization theory aims to show that, whatever else it may be–rational, reified, etc., technology expresses itself in social forms that also embody non-technical values of all sorts. This then is the program: to explain the cultural impact of technology in a technological society without losing track of the concrete social embodiment of actual devices and systems. Here is where the concept of world disclosure can be helpful, on the condition that analysis be pursued not just in terms of the question of style, but more specifically in terms of the practical constitution of technical objects and subjects.
=From the standpoint of instrumentalization theory, "disclosing new worlds" involves a complementary process of de-worlding which is inherent in technical action. The materials engaged in technical processes always already belong to a world which must be shattered as they are released for technical employment. De-worlding is the basis in the lifeworld of theoretical procedures such as quantification which make technical disciplines possible. The specific de-worlding effect of technical action touches not only the object but also the subject, as Habermas argues. The technical actor stands in an insulated, external position with respect to the lifeworld in which the objects of technical action appear. We thus distinguish a manipulative dimension in the technical relation to reality from the reciprocal relations of everyday communication. Philosophical models of instrumental rationality are generally based on this aspect of the technical. It is, for example, highlighted in Heidegger's later critique of "enframing."
=The mistake of most modernity theory is to identify this de-worlding with the essence of actual technology, without regard for other social dimensions of the technical. I conjecture that this identification is due to two features of the modern technical sphere. On the one hand, technical disciplines themselves incorporate social factors only in a stripped down, abstract form. The most humane of values, for example compassion for the sick, can only be expressed technically in objective specifications such as those of a medical treatment protocol. The fact that the protocol can be followed without compassion suggests that the objective specifications are really self-sufficient, forming a closed universe from which humanity is excluded. On the other hand, modern technology has been structured around the extension of impersonal domination to human beings and nature in profound indifference to their needs and interests. This line of technical development depends on severely restricting the range of social considerations that can be brought to bear on design. Thus de-worlding looms especially large in modern societies.
=In demonstrating the contingency of technical development, technology studies encourages us to believe in the possibility of other ways of organizing a technological society that pay more attention to human and natural needs. But an alternative is apparently unimaginable from the external perspective of modernity theorists who are generally innocent of any involvement with the messy and complex process of actual technical development. The theorists simply fail to recognize that the de-worlding associated with technology is necessarily and simultaneously entry into another world. The problems of our society are not due to de-worlding as such but to the flaws and limitations of the world to which it is adjusted.
=The correlation of de-worlding and disclosure can be traced in every technology. Logging offers a particularly graphic example of the idea of de-worlding, but even such a violent technical intervention does not consist merely in uprooting and destroying. To be sure, the world of the forest ceases to exist when the trees are cut down, but logging is already adjusted to a function in another world, a world of human construction. Thus the logs are stripped and sliced to form boards that will soon stand in dwellings of one sort or another. By their shape and size, the boards already belong to the human world they will build. Similar considerations apply to the detachment of the technical subject. Although the logger is indeed indifferent with respect to the tree he fells, and must be protected from the violent process he initiates, he does not stand beyond all worlds like some Cartesian cogito in pursuing his vocation. On the contrary, he gains an identity in a world, as a logger, from the detached activity in which he engages.
=The duality of technical processes as both de-worlding and world disclosing is reflected in the split between modernity theory and technology studies each of which emphasizes one half of the process. De-worlding is a salient feature of modern societies, which are constantly engaged in disassembling natural objects and traditional ways of doing things and substituting new technically rational ways. Focussing exclusively on the negative aspect of this process yields the dystopian critique we associate with thinkers like Weber and the later Heidegger. But de-worlding is only the other side of a process of disclosure which must be understood in social terms. Technology studies emphasizes this aspect of the process. The antinomy results from the inherently dialectical character of technical action, misunderstood unilaterally in each case.
=Instrumentalization theory characterizes this dialectic at two levels. De-worlding consists in a process of functionalization in which objects are torn out of their original contexts and exposed to analysis and manipulation while subjects are positioned for distanced control. Modern societies are unique in de-worlding human beings in order to subject them to technical action–we call it management– and in prolonging the basic gesture of de-worlding theoretically in technical disciplines which become the basis for complex technical networks. Disclosing involves a complementary process of realization which qualifies functionalization by orienting it toward a new world involving those same objects and subjects. The two processes are analytically distinguishable but joined in practice.
Terminal Subjects
=I want to conclude these reflections with an example, which I hope will illustrate the fruitfulness of a synthesis of modernity theory and technology studies. I have been involved with the evolution of communication by computer since the early 1980s both as an active participant in innovation and as a researcher. I came to this technology with a background in modernity theory, specifically Heidegger and Marcuse, whose student I was, but it quickly became apparent that they offered little guidance in understanding the phenomena. Their theories emphasized the role of technologies in controlling and dominating nature and human beings. They therefore inclined one to construct a vision of the computer as a technology of control, but what we were witnessing in the early 1980s was something quite different, the contested emergence of the new communicative practices of online community. Subsequently, we have seen cultural critics inspired by modernity theory recycle the old approach for this new application, denouncing, for example, the supposed degradation of human communication on the Internet. But that reaction presupposes that computers are actually a communications medium, if an inferior one, precisely the issue twenty years ago. The prior question that must therefore be posed concerns the emergence of the medium itself. Most recently the debate over computerization has touched higher education, where proposals for automated online learning have met determined faculty resistance in the name of human values. Meanwhile, actual online education is emerging as a new kind of communicative practice.
=The pattern of these debates is suggestive. Approaches that rely on the abstract stereotypes of modernity theory are uniformly negative and fail to explain the complex experience of participants in computer communication. Heidegger dismisses the computer as the pure type of modernity’s machinery of control. Its de-worlding power reaches language itself which is reduced to the mere position of a switch (Heidegger, 1998: 140). Borgmann extends this critique to communication on computer networks, which he sees as de-worlding the person, reducing human beings to a flow of data the "user" can easily control (Borgmann, 1992: 108). The terminal subject is basically an asocial monster despite the appearance of interaction online.
=This approach to computerization can be analyzed in terms of instrumentalization theory. The user is decontextualized in the sense that he or she is stripped of body and community in front of the terminal and positioned as a detached technical subject. The computer simplifies a full blown person down to the category of "user" in order to incorporate him or her into the network. At the same time, a highly simplified world is disclosed to the user so defined. This world is structured around the initiatives of rational consumers. The user is called to exercise choice in this realm disclosed by the network. Positioning and initiative as described here are correlated as primary and second instrumentalizations, interventions that de-world and disclose.
=The poverty of the world disclosed to the user appears to be a function of the very radical de-worlding involved in computing. However, we will see that this is not the correct explanation of what actually occurs. Nevertheless, the critique is not entirely artificial; there are types of online activity that confirm it and certain powerful actors do seek enhanced control through computerization. But the modernity theorists do not seem to take seriously the struggles and innovations of users engaged in appropriating the medium for purposes such as online community or legitimate educational experiments. In ignoring or dismissing these aspects of computerization, they fall back into a more or less disguised determinism.
=But sociological analyses of computerization that fail to take account of the issues raised by modernity theory are also incomplete. As I have argued here, Pickering’s approach offers an unsatisfactory alternative to an analysis of control problems such as David Noble proposes. Whatever one thinks of Noble’s analysis, a whole literature on industrial organization and management testifies to the reality of the issues he raises. The failure to focus the issue of control also obscures the complex history of online communication. In the course of that history communication functions were often introduced by users rather than treated as normal affordances of the medium by the originators of the systems. To make sense of this history, the competing visions of designers and users must be introduced as a significant shaping force, not dismissed as irrelevant ideologies.
=There are other problems with the "posthumanist" approch to the computer inspired by Latour and Donna Haraway. This approach often leads to a singular focus on the most "dehumanizing" aspects of computerization, such as anonymous communication, online role playing, and cybersex (Turkle, 1995). Paradoxically, from this standpoint these aspects of the online experience are interpreted in a positive light as the transcendence of the "centered" self of modernity (Stone, 1995). But such posthumanism is ultimately complicit with the humanistic critique of computerization it pretends to transcend in that it accepts a similar definition of the limits of online interaction. Again, what is missing is any sense of the profound transformations the technology undergoes at the hands of users animated by more traditional visions than one would suspect from these specialists’ choice of themes (Bakardjieva and Feenberg, forthcoming).
=The effective synthesis of these various approaches would offer a more complete picture of computerization than any one of them alone. In my writings in this field I have tried to accomplish this. I set out not from a hypothesis about the essence of the computer, for example, that it privileges control or communication, humanist or posthumanist values, but rather from an analysis of the way in which such hypotheses influence the actors themselves, shaping design and usage.
=The lifeworld of technology is the medium within which the actors engage with the technology. In this lifeworld processes of interpretation are central. Technical resources are not simply pregiven but take on their place and meaning through these processes. In Latour’s language, the "collective" is re-formed around the contested constitution of the computer as this or that type of mediation responsive to this or that actors’ program. But under the influence of theorists like Latour, technology studies has become suspicious of the very terms of the actual debates surrounding computerization. Indeed, Latour’s symmetry principle makes it difficult to recognize the privileged role of the contests between control and communication, humanism and posthumanism, that I argue must be the focus of study. How can one adopt the actors’ perspective if it contradicts the premises of one’s own method?
=Consider the case of the current struggle over the future of online education (Feenberg, 1999b, 1999c). Over the past few years, corporate strategists, state legislators, top university administrators, and "futurologists" have lined up behind a vision of online education based on automation and deskilling. They might as well have been reading Marx, although obviously not with socialist intent. Their goal is to replace (at least for the masses) the traditional university based on face-to-face teaching by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitely reproducible at decreasing unit costs, like CDs, videos, or software. The costs of education would decline sharply and the education "business" would finally become profitable. This is "modernization" with a vengeance.
=In opposition to this vision, faculty have mobilized in defense of the human touch. This humanistic opposition to computerization takes two very different forms. There are those who are opposed in principle to any electronic mediation of education. This position has no effect on the quality of computerization but only on its pace. But there are also numerous faculty who favor a model of online education that depends on human interaction on computer networks in "newsgroups" or "computer conferences." These faculty are having a positive influence on the process of computerization through their actual participation in the creation of online courses.
=On this side of the debate, a very different conception of modernity prevails. In this alternative conception, to be modern is to multiply opportunities for and modes of communication. The meaning of the computer shifts in this approach, from a coldly rational information source to a communications medium, a support for human development and online community. This alternative can be traced down to the level of technical design, for example, the conception of educational software.
=These approaches to online education can be analyzed in terms of the model of de-worlding and disclosing introduced above. Educational automation decontextualizes both the learner and the educational "product" by breaking them loose from the existing world of the university. The learner as technical subject faces menus, exercises, and questionnaires rather than other human beings engaged in a learning process.
=The faculty’s model of online education involves a much more complex secondary instrumentalization of the computer in the disclosure of a much richer world. The original positioning of the user is similar: the person facing a machine. But the machine is not a window onto an electronic mall but rather opens up onto a social world. The terminal subject is involved as a person in a new kind of social activity and is not limited by a set of canned menu options to the role of individual consumer. The corresponding software opens the range of the subject's initiative far more widely than the automated design, and thus corresponds to a more democratic conception of the network that engages it across a wider range of human needs.
-The analysis of the dispute over educational networking reveals patterns which appear throughout modern society. In the domain of media, these patterns involve playing off primary and secondary instrumentalizations in different combinations that privilege either a technocratic model of control or a democratic model of communication. Characteristically, a technocratic notion of modernity inspires a positioning of the user that sharply restricts potential initiative, while a democratic conception enlarges initiative in more complex virtual worlds. Parallel analyses of production technology or environmental problems would reveal similar patterns that could be clarified by reference to the actors’ perspectives in similar ways.
=Conclusion:=Let me conclude now by returning to my starting point briefly. I began by contrasting the theoretical revolutions of Marx and Kuhn and promising to bring them together with a method of analysis that would reconcile modernity theory and technology studies. Can a phenomenology of technical worlds do the job? Recall that Marx emphasized the discontinuity introduced into history by what has come to be called "rationalization," the emergence of modern societies based on markets and technology. This view seemed to imply a universalism erasing all cultural difference. Kuhn, by contrast, subverted the notion of progress implied in Marx's vision of an increasingly rational social process and offered us a history subordinate to culture.
=According to the approach I have developed here, rationalization describes the generalization of a particular type of de-worlding involved in technical action. That such de-worlding uproots nature and traditional worlds is clear. But on this account, rationalization no longer stands opposed to culture as such but appears as a more or less creative expression of it, disclosing new worlds. In practice this means that there may be many paths of rationalization, each relative to a different cultural framework. Rationality is not an alternative to culture that can stand alone as the principle of a social order, for better or worse. Rather, rationality in its modern technical form mediates cultural expression in ways that can in principle realize a wide range of values. The poverty of the actual techno-culture must be traced not to the essence of technology but to other dimensions of our society such as the economic forces that dominate technical development, design, and the media. This insight challenges us to engage in what Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores have called "ontological designing," the self-conscious construction of technological worlds supporting a desirable conception of what it is to be human (Winograd and Flores, 1987: 179).
=We can fruitfully combine modernity theory and technology studies in an empirically informed, critical approach to important social problems. The triviality that threatens a strictly descriptive, empirical approach to such humanly significant technical phenomena as experimentation on human subjects, nuclear power, or online education, can be avoided without falling into the opposite error of apriori theorizing. The alternative–global condemnation, narrow empiricism–is not exhaustive. There are ways of recovering some of the normative richness of the critique of modernity within a more concrete sociological framework that does allow entry to a few facts. Concepts like "rationality," which technology studies have set out to demystify, can be employed in a new way, and the implicit emancipatory intent of that demystification brought to the surface as an explicit goal. Perhaps someday soon the disciples of Marx and Kuhn will be able to lie down together in the fields of the Lord.
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Social Learning Theory (A. Bandura)
Overview:
The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: "Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action." (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences. The component processes underlying observational learning are: (1) Attention, including modeled events (distinctiveness, affective valence, complexity, prevalence, functional value) and observer characteristics (sensory capacities, arousal level, perceptual set, past reinforcement), (2) Retention, including symbolic coding, cognitive organization, symbolic rehearsal, motor rehearsal), (3) Motor Reproduction, including physical capabilities, self-observation of reproduction, accuracy of feedback, and (4) Motivation, including external, vicarious and self reinforcement.
Because it encompasses attention, memory and motivation, social learning theory spans both cognitive and behavioral frameworks. Bandura's theory improves upon the strictly behavioral interpretation of modeling provided by Miller & Dollard (1941). Bandura’s work is related to the theories of Vygotsky and Lave which also emphasize the central role of social learning.
Scope/Application:
Social learning theory has been applied extensively to the understanding of aggression (Bandura, 1973) and psychological disorders, particularly in the context of behavior modification (Bandura, 1969). It is also the theoretical foundation for the technique of behavior modeling which is widely used in training programs. In recent years, Bandura has focused his work on the concept of self-efficacy in a variety of contexts (e.g., Bandura, 1997).
Example:
The most common (and pervasive) examples of social learning situations are television commercials. Commercials suggest that drinking a certain beverage or using a particular hair shampoo will make us popular and win the admiration of attractive people. Depending upon the component processes involved (such as attention or motivation), we may model the behavior shown in the commercial and buy the product being advertised.
Principles:
1. The highest level of observational learning is achieved by first organizing and rehearsing the modeled behavior symbolically and then enacting it overtly. Coding modeled behavior into words, labels or images results in better retention than simply observing.
2. Individuals are more likely to adopt a modeled behavior if it results in outcomes they value.
3. Individuals are more likely to adopt a modeled behavior if the model is similar to the observer and has admired status and the behavior has functional value.
References:
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press.
Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of Behavior Modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Bandura, A. & Walters, R. (1963). Social Learning and Personality Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Miller, N. & Dollard, J. (1941). Social Learning and Imitation. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.
Other descriptions of Bandura’s work can be found at:
http://fates.cns.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/bandura.htm
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/bandura.html
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